Put your Reputation on the Line

It’s a bit like telling all your family and friends when you’re starting a diet or quitting smoking. Your reputation is on the line. Powerful incentive for task completion!

We all know how easy it is to put off things that are a little risky.

What if something comes up and we’re not ready?

Something will always come up if we start out with that possibility in mind. We’re busy – we lose focus. Opportunity knocks every day for entrepreneurs, and we’re right there to open the door.

One way to get motivated is to create a deadline – one that other people know about. As professionals and small business owners, our reputation is of the utmost importance to our continued success.

Put your reputation on the line and you will get things done. And that should grow your reputation more.

originally published in Work Better, Not Harder newsletter Mar-12-14

Click to Tweet this Article
Click to Comment

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

This Useful Process Helps You Teach with Your Writing

Image
If you do any amount of training or facilitating work with customers, you may already be familiar with adult learning models. Teachers use them to prepare insightful learning experiences. The one I'm familiar with is Kolb's Experiential Learning Cycle but there are others equally useful: Learning can start at any stage in the cycle: Concrete experience - encounter a new experience or reinterpret an existing experience Reflective observation - reflect on an experience from a personal perspective Abstract conceptualization - form new ideas (or revise existing ideas) based on reflection Active experimentation - apply new ideas to surroundings, test for changes in the next experience The next time you sit down to write an article intended to teach, consider following this process. Pick the most obvious stage at which to start for the topic you have in mind. Work your way through the cycle, perhaps having a paragraph or two for each stage. Your writing will fl...
Keep reading »

This is Why People Who Subscribe Don't Get Your Stuff

Image
You work hard to attract new subscribers who find value in what you're offering. Someone makes a decision to sign up to your mailing list expecting to receive that great value and... they don't hear a thing from you. I'm not talking about businesses who have sign up forms yet never send a thing - that's a different blog post (and hopefully that's not you). Delivering your precious content to your fans has always been a challenge - what with spam filters, corporate gateways, and then trying to stand out in the inbox. What you may not have realized is that Google has become society's censor, whether you use it yourself or not. Google decides what gmail users see in their inbox , and what gets (sometimes arbitrarily) moved to the promotions folder - out of sight, out of mind. Even if you want to receive newsletters from your clients, or get this week's sales at the mall, Google may decide you don't. This is interfering with: satisfying your subsc...
Keep reading »

Why and How to Do a Wrap-up Article

Image
A wrap-up article is a logical and unique grouping of pieces of content where the grouping provides value to the reader beyond the individual pieces on their own. You might think of it like a themed gift basket. There are several reasons we need to be creating these wrap-up articles. They... serve as a great resource - valuable information grouped together use commonly searched keywords and phrases (good SEO) encourage deeper reading are often faster to create provide a process to repurpose past content remind us of what we've written and provide inspiration to write more Wrap-up articles serve us better than just about any other content we might create. Of course, we have to be creating content on a  regular basis  to be able to wrap it up. There are lots of different ways to group pieces of content : by topic - e.g. content idea generation, writing tips by use - e.g. how-to, conceptual, tips by thing - e.g. infographics, videos by user - e.g. for begi...
Keep reading »

Oh, Look! There Goes My Goal

Image
I don't need to tell you how hard it is to stay focused. And that's why it's so important to have goals that we can refer to that will keep us on track. Goals are sometimes quite removed from our daily activities. Once they're determined , a strategy is built around them. And then plans are made to execute the strategy. Next plans are broken down into action items and finally, we do or delegate specific tasks. When we're in "task mode" our goals may be completely out of mind. That's not a bad thing... as long as we're doing the things we planned to implement the strategy that will achieve our goals. Deviating from our plans is where we can get into trouble , and one way that happens is called "scope creep". That's a project management term - what is running a small business if not an ever-evolving project? Scope creep can happen accidentally but also "on purpose" and we need to be cautious of either. It's ea...
Keep reading »

Social Media Day Halifax 2018 Marketing Conference

Image
For the first time, Halifax will be celebrating Social Media Day in grand style this year. I'm proud to be one of the organizers of the first Social Media Day Halifax 2018 conference taking place on June 22nd. The conference is for entrepreneurs, business owners, and professionals working in social media roles for companies and organizations. Sessions and workshops are for anyone and everyone who wants and needs to improve their social media communications and marketing. Since Social Media Day Halifax is all about increasing marketing expertise on the east coast, recruiting presenters who are both subject matter experts AND excellent training facilitators is key to the success of the conference. Ideally, we’ll find social media professionals who want to help encourage, inspire, train and motivate colleagues in the local marketing community. If you're on the east coast of Canada and do social media marketing, you don't want to miss this conference and the chance ...
Keep reading »

Is Your Blog Browse Friendly?

Some of you may be blogging to drive readers to a target post of the day but for those of you blogging to have your readers browse your blog much like a magazine, you will want to make sure you are making full use of tags or labels. Tag and label tools are used to put your blog posts in category buckets that are easy to search and browse by the reader. You may want to consider adding a search tool on your front page that searches only your blog posts or a menu list already categorized with links to specific posts. The easier you make it for your reader to browse, the higher the possibility they will linger. Click to Tweet this Article
Keep reading »

I Want to Start Blogging: Now What?

Image
Think of it like learning to drive a car. You’ll need to learn how to drive and you’ll need a car to drive. Which comes first? Some of the learning… the theory part. You can learn about both driving a car and blogging easily enough online. That theory might consist of strategic information, tactics and instructions. Now, it’s hard to go any further without a vehicle. You can borrow a car from a friend, you can rent one, or you can buy one. Likewise, you have 3 options with blogging: Write guest posts for other people’s blogs. You’ll be limited in what you can share, subject to others’ approval and schedule. This option is quick and easy but unreliable as a long-term strategy. Use Facebook Notes or LinkedIn Pulse to publish your articles. You don’t really own them but you can pretend you do. If you can’t yet afford the effort and cost of getting your own car, err blog, this is a great alternative. You can immediately start putting what you learned into practice. Get a blogg...
Keep reading »

This Simple Tip Will Improve Your Writing... and Your Confidence

Image
Sometimes it's hard to heed my own advice. Even when I know this particular piece of advice is perhaps the most important when it comes to creating content. I can give you a number of tips to help you write better articles. But there is one simple thing you can do that can really improve the quality of your work, to make your content more useful and interesting. This tip is particularly ingenious - are you ready for it? Prepare your content over two separate sittings , preferably on two different days. It's a simple concept but often not so easy to implement with deadlines looming . First sitting: do an outline research if necessary write a draft Second sitting: review and edit your draft add appropriate links to past articles run spell-check and proof (read aloud if you don't have a proofer) Coming back to your writing with fresh eyes will almost always result in improvement. Because you are taking extra care to craft your messages, you'll feel mo...
Keep reading »

3 Questions That Need Answering: Lessons Learned From My Lunch and Learn

Image
(Guest post by Mike Tanner) I recently (like, earlier today) had the pleasure of speaking to a room full of close to 50 people on a topic near and dear to my heart: podcasting. Now I’m not going to sit here and give you a recap of that talk. If you want the VERY basic details you can find them on my website but you’ll never recapture the magic that we all shared in that room that day... Instead, I’d like to talk about three questions that I was asked during the talk and how they relate to running your own business, podcasting or otherwise. How Much Do You Charge Someone To Sponsor a Podcast? Pricing is complicated. It’s a fact. Ask anyone who does consulting or coaching or training or anything where there’s not a defined cost or supply and demand issue, and they will tell you that pricing is one of the most difficult things to figure out. Whether you’re trying to figure out how to price your course or how much to charge for web copy or how much to charge a sponsor to be a...
Keep reading »

Prove by Deeds, not Reasons

Image
Intentions don’t make a bit of difference. It’s perceptions that matter. Intentions can get us motivated and keep us honest. But those things are about us, not the other person. The other person often doesn’t know or care about our intentions. My intention might be to do an excellent job. If there’s a spelling error, that intention won’t mean a thing. The perception will be of a sloppy job. Having good intentions is, well, good. But they only point us in the right direction. Intentions need to be translated into actions that ‘walk the talk’. Demonstrating our intentions is the only way to influence others’ perceptions. “In art, intentions are not sufficient and, as we say in Spanish, love must be proved by deeds and not by reasons. What one does is what counts and not what one had the intention of doing.” - Pablo Picasso - Intentions might pave the way but success in business is all about perception. Click to Tweet this Article Originally published in Work Better,...
Keep reading »